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Hingham man sent away for tire-iron beating outside West Roxbury party
By adamg on Thu, 10/06/2011 - 11:24am
Thomas McCann, 27, was sentenced to 18 months in jail today for bashing a man's head in with a tire iron at a party he crashed in West Roxbury last year, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.
Suffolk Superior Court Judge Diane Kottmyer technically sentenced McCann to 2 1/2 years in jail following his conviction on assault and battery causing serious bodily injury, but suspended 12 months of the sentence on the provision he stay out of trouble and take anger-management classes after he's released from jail.
Prosecutors had asked for three to five years in state prison. They said McCann's victim, 33, required brain surgery and lost 40% of his peripheral vision due to the attack.
The DA's office said McCann learned of the June 6 party on Pleasantdale Road on Facebook, then showed up with a couple of friends and his sister, who got into an argument with the victim that spilled outside around 3:40 a.m. McCann ended the argument with the tire iron, then fled in a car back to Hingham as the victim lay at the end of the driveway. Some of the victim's blood was found on the steering wheel.
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Comments
Massachusetts does it again!
See you in 18 months when this savage partially blinds another guy!
Trying to kill somebody only gets 18 months?
It's an outrage that a potentially lethal assault would end with a slap on the wrist.
Why wasn't this an attempted murder charge?
In any event, utterly ridiculous sentence.
Malice aforethought?
The story implies a lack of premeditation. Usually murder requires either that, or that the death be incidental to the commission of another crime.
That's my layman's take on it at any rate.
Pretty much -- the crucial
Pretty much -- the crucial element of assault with intent to murder (in addition to the assault, obviously) is a specific intent not merely to do bodily harm but to kill. As the jury instructions state, this "involves concentrating or focusing the mind for some perceptible period. It is a conscious act, with the determination of the mind to do an act. It is contemplation rather than reflection, and it must precede the act."
Here, the evidence didn't support that charge. (And in fact, the jury convicted of assault and battery, but not assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.)
This jury didn't think....
...that using a crowbar to bash in someone's skull involved use of a dangerous weapon? Were they so sheltered that they didn't know what a crowbar was?
What do you expect?
The problem with juries is they're full of people who are too dumb to get out of serving on a jury.
Such a dark joke
Especially in its implication that all the "smart" people couldn't give a rat's ass about justice or civic duty. Better to bitch on the Internet about the courts.
Funny, but disturbing.
Limitations of the Jury
Or, also to the point, that defense lawyers work very hard to keep jurors off of panels who they deem unsympathetic to the cause of their clients...